The Turin Shroud is to go on public display for the first time in a decade, sources at the Vatican have indicated, coinciding with a new set of tests on its age.The linen has only been put on display five times in the last century
The Vatican keeps the 14ft by 4ft piece of linen, believed by some to be the death shroud of Jesus, in an aluminium case built by an Italian aerospace company to shut out all light, air and humidity.
The case is filled with Argon gas in order to prevent bacteria from eating the material.
However, the success of the exhibition of Padre Pio’s remains in Puglia has convinced the Vatican to bring forward the next public showing of the shroud from 2025 to the year after next.
The linen has only been put on display five times in the last century and the last time it was exhibited, in 2000, over half a million visitors arrived in Turin in two months.
The exhibition will coincide with a new set of scientific tests on the Shroud in order to verify its age.
Professor Christopher Ramsey, the head of Oxford University’s Radiocarbon Accelerator unit, first dated the Shroud to between 1260 and 1390 in tests conducted 20 years ago.
However, he has agreed to refresh his analysis after academics suggested that the presence of carbon monoxide in the material could have given a misleading result.
Believers think the Shroud miraculously shows the face and body of Jesus after crucifixion. Tests by John Jackson, a professor at the University of Colorado proved the image on the Shroud had not been painted, dyed or stained.
An project to photograph the Shroud has also been recently completed. A 12.8 billion pixel image of the linen was made after the Vatican asked for a detailed reproduction to be made for scholars to scrutinise.
Mauro Gavinelli, who supervised the project, said 1,600 photographs had been stitched together, and said the result was like “looking at the Shroud through a microscope”.
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